Staff Systems Engineer, Payroll Orchestration

Rippling; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 315,000; Full time

Job summary

Rippling is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for Payroll Orchestration to design and build the core distributed payroll engine across major countries. You will work on scalable platforms using message queues, bitemporal data models, and data pipelines to ensure accurate payroll processing.

The role emphasizes concurrency, observability, and high availability, with a strong emphasis on collaboration across engineering teams and delivering reliable payroll solutions at scale.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Proficiency in Go or Python.
• Experience building scalable distributed systems.
• Strong knowledge of queues and job orchestration (Temporal, Kafka).
• DB transactions (Mongo, PostgreSQL) and analytical engines (Snowflake, ClickHouse).

Responsibilities

• Design and implement distributed systems with a platform mindset.
• Write clean, maintainable, well-documented code.
• Ensure data consistency with concurrency controls and message ordering.
• Orchestrate workflows using Temporal and message queues.
• Build efficient data pipelines for fast payroll data.
• Ensure observability with monitoring, logging, tracing.
• Aim for high availability and reliability with SLAs.

Skills

Go

Python

Distributed systems

Scalability

Communication

Independent work

Tools

Temporal

Kafka

Mongo

PostgreSQL

Snowflake

ClickHouse

Job description

Rippling is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for Payroll Orchestration to design and build the core distributed payroll engine across major countries. You will work on scalable platforms using message queues, bitemporal data models, and data pipelines to ensure accurate payroll processing.

The role emphasizes concurrency, observability, and high availability, with a strong emphasis on collaboration across engineering teams and delivering reliable payroll solutions at scale.